EVEN if there seems to have been no particular reason for writing her book, M. G. Lord has produced a marvellous ramble linked to the life and times of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where her father worked as an engineer.
It includes autobiography, the history of space flight and exploration, social history, rocket science under the Nazis and the rise of women, indigence and technology. It also covers the dangerous absurdities of the McCarthy era in the US, when researchers such as Werhner von Braun, who directed the Nazi efforts that culminated in V2 bombardment of London…
